Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [10]
Chapter 3
Mrs. Mothershead was the London Hospital. An inflexible woman in her early fifties with a hard, powerful face, she had been the Hospital’s Head Matron for fifteen years, which was longer in a position of authority than could be claimed by anyone else—including Mr. Carr-Gomm, the head of the Hospital Administrative Committee. As such she commanded respect. Carr-Gomm himself addressed her with careful courtesy. Young doctors avoided her. Established doctors said “Please.”
Mr. Mothershead had always been a shadowy figure. One doctor, who had been a medical student fifteen years ago, and remained on the staff ever since, maintained stoutly that the husband had no existence, and that Miss Mothershead had slipped gradually into Mrs. about the time of her elevation to the highest nursing post. This was widely accepted as accurate and natural. Somehow authority sat more easily on a married woman, even if the title was only one of courtesy.
Of her background only one thing was known for certain, and that was that she was one of the new breed of nurses that had emerged in the sixties under the influence of Miss Nightingale. Prior to that nurses had been drunks, prostitutes, women of whom so little moral standing was expected that it was actually preferred for them to have had an illegitimate child. Above all they received no training. To be female and squalid was considered enough.
Miss Nightingale altered all that. After returning from her great work in the Crimea, she set up the very first English training school for nurses, attached to St. Thomas’s Hospital. In July 1860 it took in its first batch of students, one of whom was Mrs. (or possibly Miss) Mothershead.
The school was designed to do two things, to provide future nurses with a whole year’s training and to establish nursing as a profession for decent women. No student was taken in without a certificate of good conduct, and if her standard of personal behavior did not remain impeccably high she was thrown out. The students lived in a nurses home, their outings were scrutinized, and reports about their characters and actions flew back and forth at speed.
It was a revolution, and like all revolutions it produced its fanatics—such as Mrs. Mothershead, who had been told so often in her student days that the whole future of nursing depended on her and women like her that she had never been able to forget it; a woman who still made daily entries in her diary, just as she had done in those long ago days at St. Thomas’s, knowing that at the end of the month what she had written would be studied by Miss Nightingale herself in a frantic attempt to get into her students’ minds and prize out any thoughts that might threaten the success of the experiment.
Mrs. Mothershead watched her own students with the same suspicious eyes that had once been cast on her, demanded that they live like nuns and nurse like saints, froze them with her contempt when they displeased her, but warmed them with her generous praise when she felt they deserved it. She was capable of huge kindness, but she was even more capable of ignoring human emotions in the service of “her” profession.
These days ordinary nursing duties took up less and less of her time. Mostly her life was spent teaching or sitting at the long desk at the end of the Receiving Room. From her position of advantage in this bare, grey-painted hall she made entries, issued certificates, checked details. The hardest part of this job was shutting out the disturbing noise of frightened people as they entered the hospital and crowded onto the long rows of benches in the hall. Children wailed, men with injuries moaned, and amid it all Mrs. Mothershead tried to get her paperwork right and wished the noise would go away.
On this particular morning she had succeeded in reducing the racket to background so successfully that its sudden cessation affected her like a thunderclap. She looked up to see what had caused the silence and saw two figures walking down the length of